Monthly Archives: June 2005

For the latest news and information on traumatic brain injury check out http://www.braininjury.blog.com hosted by Michael Kaplen, Esq., President of the Brain Injury Association of New York State and a leading advocate for the brain injured. He is a a member of the New York State Traumatic Brain Injury Services Coordinating Council and the past chair of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group.

An area of the hippocampal formation (dMEC, dorsocaudal medial entorhinal cortex) contains neurons which fire when the animal is in a particular location (like hippocampal place cells), but which have a strikingly regular mapping from neurons to locations (that is, the “place field” to which each cell responds is very regular and geometric).

The doctor pulled out the four main nerves that used to connect to the patient’s damaged arm and put them beneath the skin in his chest. The prosthetic has a device that presses on the chest to communicate information from the prosthetic.

Looks like spinal cord regeneration might be the first target for embryonic stem cell therapy trials in humans. More info in the Science article.

It looks like Geron has developed a protocol to reliably induce ES cells to become oligodendrocytes, the glial cells that produce the myelin sheath. Here’s the details from the article:

For newly injured rats, the results are promising. In animals that received oligodendrocyte precursors 7 days after their injury, the cells survived and apparently helped repair the spinal cord’s myelin. Within 2 weeks, treated rats scored significantly better on standardized movement tests than control animals, which had received human fibroblasts or a cell-free injection.

Neat story in the WaPo on the evolution of decussation (the crossings — mostly in the brainstem — that cause motor/sensory information to be processed in opposite halves of the brain from where the action is).

The article quotes Denis Jabaudon as extending an explanation originally from Ramon y Cajal: That the sensorimotor system is simply following suite with the visual system, which itself reversed right and left in the brain to compensate for the 180 degree inversion of an image on the retina (due to the lens of the eye).